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ports like Beethoven and Brahms, and later Mahler, Schoenberg, and Berg. We may recall that Freud claimed he didn’t like music because he did not wish to be emotionally moved by something he didn’t understand rationally.26 Where rational understanding wasn’t possible, he wanted no part of it—even if it meant a life more or less without music, except for Don Giovanni! Now in its “irrational” quality, the experience of music is indeed often close to religious experience, and for many listeners it brings on religious experience. For Freud, such experiences were too disturbing, even threatening. Music would trigger Moravian memories of music at the Freiberg church with his nanny, and their associated emotions. These unconscious, religiously tinged memories could only bring on a painful unease.
Freud’s word for religious experience was somewhat unusual, and betrayed his desire to avoid such experience. He referred to it as “the oceanic feeling.”27 Such terminology—in contrast, for example, to “the peak experience”—shows that Freud viewed religious experience as something primitive, archaic, lower than the experience of daily life (people live above sea level); moreover, he saw it as something dangerous, in which one might drown. In this wateriness, it may also have been associated with baptism, and with feminine principles. By contrast, the term “peak experience” suggests something higher than the experiences of daily life; something elevated and requiring much effort to reach it; something that, when reached, allows one to see far and to look down on others. No, Freud did not have any conscious desire for religious experience; indeed, he had the conscious desire to have no religious experience. And as far as anyone has been able to tell, except for the very troubling experience on the Acropolis, he got his wish. In the context of this discussion, it should be noted that Freud’s complaint that many people do not have religious experiences was clearly disingenuous. Since Freud never sought such experience (he even avoided it), it is not so surprising that he didn’t have any! Freud would never have been allowed to get away with setting himself up as a critic of music or as an aesthetician of musical experience, nor would he have attempted such a thing. Why, then, has he been allowed to reject, as an “expert,” the existence of something that he studiously avoided experiencing and finding out about? The Nanny and the Projection of DisillusionmentThe question of why Freud’s critique has been influential would take us far afield into the psychology and sociology of modern life, and so we return to our investigation of Freud, and in particular to his argument in |